Exploring the Use of Colored Ambient Lights to Convey Emotional Cues With Conversational Agents: An Experimental Study

Conversational agents (CAs) lack of possibilities to enrich the interaction with emotional cues, although this makes the conversation more human-like and enhances user engagement. Thus, the potential of CAs is not fully exploit and possibilities to convey emotional cues are needed. In this work, CAs use colored ambient lights to display moral emotions during the interaction. To evaluate this approach, a between-subject lab experiment $(N=64)$ was conducted. Participants played a cooperation game with Amazon’s Alexa. Depending on the experimental condition participants received different light expressions: no light, neutral light, or morally emotional light (yellow = joy, blue = sorrow, red = anger matching the game decisions). The effect of the light expressions on the perception of the CA, users’ empathy and cooperation behavior was tested. Against our assumptions, the results indicated no positive effect of the emotional light cues. Limitations, next steps, and implications are discussed.